"What’s more, languages are conduits of human heritage. Writing is a relatively recent development in our history (written systems currently exist for only about one-third of the world’s languages), so language itself is often the only way to convey a community’s songs, stories and poems. The Iliad was an oral story before it was written, as was The Odyssey. “How many other traditions are out there in the world that we’ll never know about because no-one recorded them before the language disappeared?” Austin says. ""
The Illiad is doing just fine in the many different languages it has been translated into. Preserving languages as living, spoken tongues is not necessary for the mere preservation of stories and history.
"Without the language, the culture itself might teeter, or even disappear. “If we are to survive, to continue on and to exist as a people with a distinct and unique culture,” he continues, “then we have to have a language.” “It’s very hard as an English speaker to understand that,” "
This is true. English is now so widely used that it isn't really associated with one particular culture. You can travel to a completely alien country that speaks English, just differently than you.
“Different languages provide distinct pathways of thought and frameworks for thinking and solving problems,” Harrison says. Returning to Cherokee, unlike English it is verb rather than noun-based, and those verbs can be conjugated in a multitude of ways based on who they are acting upon."
Many languages have unique attributes that let them excel at certain things. German, for example, is fantastic for creating compound words (e.g. Gedankenexperiment). English, however, gleefully swallows up such words and incorporates them.
"There are also a few examples of languages being revived even after actually going extinct. By the 1960s, the last fluent Miami language speakers living in the American Midwest passed away. Thanks largely to the efforts of one interested member of the Miami Nation tribe, however, the language is now taught at Miami University in Ohio. "
Another example of this is written Mayan. The first archbishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa, deliberately wiped out every trace of written Mayan he could. Paper codices were burned. Stone monuments were defaced. Literate Mayans were executed. He was so successful that, by the 20th century, written Mayan was a complete mystery. It has since been deciphered, but outside of a very small number of paper codices, all that remains are stone monuments. This is unfortunate. Consider the writing on monuments in Washington as compared to what's in the Library of Congress.
As useful as different languages may be for different things, they're also distressingly good at preventing us from communicating with and understanding each other. Perhaps the rise of more global languages is worth paying the price of losing some of our lingual diversity.